The Internet medium is an awkward medium within the art industry. It has no intrinsic value other than providing a basic measurement of your advertising ROI for your site’s requests for engagement. Additionally, it’s immaterial and therefore incapable of generating monetary gain on its own, but rather directs the engaged to more traditional means [even online] of market exchange where they are able to collect material souvenirs of their online experience. Thus, net art is more directly capable of referring to art’s hidden social role as an abstract economy. After all, it’s one of the largest unmediated and illiquid markets in the [public] world.

With this said, there are Net Artists that continue to test the potential of the Internet medium. Rafaël Rozendaal, http://www.newrafael.com/, is a Dutch-Brazilian artist that has helped pioneer the “single serving site” and has developed an international exhibition reputation [e.g. "Los Angeles, Barcelona, Tokyo and London amongst others."]. Each site/work is an interactive animation that simply does what static works of art cannot: it plays with you/you play with it. In addition to each work’s share-value [i.e. the value produced by the gesture of sending a site link to a friend and them thinking "wow, that's pretty cool; so-and-so is cool for sharing this and now I will share this and create the same cool value for myself"], and an online store that sells limited addition prints of the work, Rozendaal sells the individual domain spaces as collectible works of art.

Recently, Rozendall has opened a new exhibition in Berlin, at The Future Gallery. Below is a video walk through of the exhibition. The following links will take you to the works being exhibited: TowardsAndBeyond.com, IntoTime.com, HybridMoment.com. Please note the corresponding title information for each work at the top of the browser window.

Humor in art has historically been seen as being in poor taste, blasphemous, and sometimes even subversive. Thus, you can’t teach humor in art, and the fuzzy sheen of the serious will continue to be the bid of collector awareness. Whatever. The professional Brit humorist, Harry Hill, has been making these paintings recently and I can’t help but wonder if I love them because they’re funny, or if because for some reason they represent some sort of therapeutic freedom from art. Look, see and wonder.

“Versions, 2010,” by Oliver Laric is a rather brilliant illustration of the warm place we all have in our hearts for simulation and its recapitulative capacity regarding the power of the IMAGE. Additionally, “Versions, 2010,” is a newer version of “Versions, 2009.” Both are capable of supplying the visual artist and/or creative with an apropos “WTF are you doing?” moment.

Oliver Laric is also part of the [mostly online] curatorial powerhouse that is VVORK

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Lately, I’ve been personally investing a great deal of my energy into co-birthing the following collaborative entity. Legwork, via the means of its own description, is a Berlin- and Hannover-based collaborative concerned with situational articulations and circulations of meaning, ranging from figurative to discursive. Its web presence is at legwork.cc.

The collaboration will materialize through various mediums and will be centrally located (whatever that means anymore) online, through monthly issues. The first bit of writing I’ve done with Legwork is entitled, Cooking Invocation. The following summary of the piece was prepared for Legwork’s newsletter: “That the preparation of a meal should wield such discursive currency in the contemporary art world says something meaty about the status of the medium of the everyday in contemporary artistic practice. Tobey Albright prepares.” You can read the full article here.

Two additional [brilliant!] articles on hybridized choreography, situated between YouTube and Art Fairs, and a collaborative Giorgio Agamben TrendMatrix, are also held within its web pages. And if those claims alone don’t make you want to interface with Legwork, the admission that my two Legworkian collaborators, Egle Obcarskaite and Timothy Murray, have two of the more brilliant minds and engaging practices as anyone I’ve had the pleasure to play with before, will certainly persuade you. Go!

www.Legwork.cc

Occasionally, a bit of writing comes along that strikes a chord of resonance nearly too perfect to be true. The sound of this particular resonance echos around the complicated cavern of discernment that an artist’s role operates in relation to a public [whatever that may be]. Clearly, rendering a history of an artist’s behavioral tendency to perform the responsibilities and power dynamics of an institution has an essential urgency that needs to be addressed. Thus, the essay, “Art Without Artists,” by Anton Vidokle [mentioned in admiration several times before], currently being occupied by the 16th issue of the E-Flux journal, does just this. Please read the entire essay at e-flux.com/journal. If you are involved in any activities, be them collective, collaborative or organizational, you owe it to the history of your methodology to read this essay.

…

“If the artist is already expected to question the social, the economic, the cultural, and so forth, then it goes without saying that when a curator supersedes the artist’s capacity as a social critic, we abandon the critical function embodied by the role of the artist and reduce the agency of art.”

…

“If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use—rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the ‘freedom of art.’”

…

“It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled—and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environment—exhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics—through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth—rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art’s only possible, ultimate destination. ”

“As Group Material, Martha Rosler, and other artists in the 1980s demonstrated, curating can become a part of artistic practice just as any social form or activity can. For example, Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here began as an immediate response to a lack of institutional support for an exhibition she was invited to do at the Dia Center for the Arts. Rosler felt that the best way to do something there was by positioning herself as curator/organizer—a kind of one-person institution rather than an individual artist. This resulted in a project comprising several exhibitions on housing and homelessness involving numerous artists, architects, activists, and community groups, which then turned out to be a seminal artwork that influenced several generations of artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green, Liam Gillick, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marion von Osten, and many others.”

I like to imagine that collapsing the economy is extremely important for establishing additional relational value structures and ultimately encouraging more sustainable ways to survive together in the 21st Century. [If you're a return-reader, you are well aware of this and are probably tired of hearing me say it.]

Cue the presciently [somewhat] well supported efforts of Temporary Services, who are comprised of Brett Bloom, Marc Fischer and Salem Collo-Julin, and have been producing exhibitions, events, projects, and publications since 1998. Their latest project is Art Work : A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, and is directly concerned with the livelihood of artists in the Untited States of America.

Their efforts to establish a professional knowledge base and platform for concrete career sustainability is an incredibly transgressive action for the fine art industry [including the aspects of it that don't involve class theatrics: Jeffrey Deitch/Biennales/Art Fairs].

Finally, an organization that helps artists do what they’re not inherently good at, because they’re mostly arrested by their own intuitive organizations.

On the projects download page, you can download the publication in various formats, making the consumption of the support-oriented information extremely easy to access.

If you are an art educator, please make this publication project part of your curriculum, IMMEDIATELY.

Additionally, you can learn more about Temporary Services and the Art Work publication at Rhizome.org.

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The following art school art talk stars an impressive cast of competent professionals such as Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Colin Lang, Robert Linsley, Mira Schor, and Howard Singerman.

The professionals discuss the professionalization of the art-field in addition to non-traditional teaching methods, the history of art’s academy, and the further development of ‘models for the future of art school.’

The two hour thirteen minute and fourty-eight second performance is a wonderful tool for discussing the art production of institutions and their abilities to define the philosophical grounds in which art develops its social functions. The performance does [through attempting to] do much more than this, but you’ll have to listen to name the what and how. Listen and download from Cabinet magazine’s site.

Additionally, this discussion is great when coupled with considerations of the amateur in relation to the professional, in After the Amature, by Ed Halter, on Rhizome.Org.

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The following promotional video is a strangely poetic visualization strategy for thinking about industries that depend on content based place-making. [I clearly like to think of "Art" working this way, as its nature of being an organically replicating collective activity is responsible for local gentrification and God knows how many tourism grants.]

The video is also incredibly helpful in my own pursuit of expressing my fascination and use of the color green.

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[Curious minds will investigate ☝.]

I hate to share the end with you first, but it’s too poetically pragmatic to not:
“The fact that such strategies devolved inexorably into their own sort of market-friendly style just proves a point. On both sides, “traditional” and “conceptual,” the perceived ill of the other is actually just the displaced face of the market itself, with its tendency to transmogrify and vulgarize everything. Which should provide a lesson for critics about the kind of promises they make for art: There are no formal or esthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces — only political and economic solutions. Consequently, the only critical temperament that makes any real sense is an eclectic one that doesn’t build up one or the other side into the answer for problems that they both share.”
Please read the entire article, by Ben Davis, here. It’s highly recommended.

Here-in lies the implicit beauty of conceptualism and its relation to “the marketplace”: All the best conceptual artists are advertisers.

For some reason, artists like to imagine themselves as a band of outsiders [or just a single outsider], huddled next to the campfire of art history, letting it burn all sorts of psychedelic images into their behavioral corneas while they wait for a message from their gods to show them the way. The problem is that they don’t realize the gods have a relationship with “the market,” and that the art history flame has always burned a little brighter with the help of currency.

Thus, I’ve always been a firm believer in the position that any position, including that which is in direct opposition of another position, is still just that “other” position itself. Or, a little differently: the thing in which we hate is hate itself, embodied by the hater, being the hated.

The fact that we still have this conversation of The Conceptualist Vs. The Traditionalist is most likely due to the repetition of collective discomfort during times of shifting abstractions [otherwise known as The Crisis].

Unfortunately [because I'm an advocate], if I were to be critical of the current state of conceptual thought and practice, I might draw parallels such as “conceptual art is a blanket behavior of representational self-reflection, which is unfortunately, at this moment, more superficial than a landscape or a still-life.”

[Post prompted /in part/ by a conversation with Bradley Wester.]
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If you follow art-world gossip, you’re probably aware that their is an ethical conversation happening in regards to the insularity and small-town-mindedness of the global art world. The drama is being played out by various agents of the press, and stars the New Museum and billionaire art-aggregator Dakis Joannou. The drama is rather complicated and unfolds in many directions, such as e-flux’s brilliantly immediate response announcement:
“In response to a series of articles concerning museum ethics that appeared last week in the New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Time, New York Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and blogs such as Art Fag City, Modern Art Notes, and JamesWagner.com, we would like to bring to your attention several helpful resources on this subject and let you know about a conference taking place at the Seton Hall University today.”

New Directions in Museum Ethics: A Conference of Graduate Student Research
November 14, 2009, 8:30 am-4:30pm
Seton Hall University
Science and Technology Building
Science Center Atrium & Room 101
South Orange, New Jersey

http://www.museumethics.org/

The International Council of Museums: Code of Ethics for Museums

American Association of Museums: Code of Ethics for Museums

The most acutely emotional, synoptic version of this currency is by Mr. Jerry Saltz’ article, Money, Insularity, and a Huge Controversy for the New Museum, in New York Magazine, where he outlines said dynamics as follows:
“In this case, the circle looks something like this: Joannou, a New Museum trustee, is friendly with Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director. Her curator, Massimiliano Gioni, has worked previously with Joannou, and he oversaw the current three-floor Urs Fischer show. Urs Fischer has curated shows for Joannou; Joannou also owns a good deal of Fischer’s work. Fischer’s art dealer is Gavin Brown, who also represents Elizabeth Peyton, Jeremy Deller, and Steven Shearer, all four of whom have had solo shows at the New Museum since it re-opened less than two years ago. I like that the art world isn’t regulated. I have seen Joannou’s collection and it is incredible. Still, when you add in Koons as the curator here the whole thing just breaks down. If only the museum would have either curated the collection itself or gotten someone else to do it …”

[The amazingness of New York Magazine's web intelligence is on display below (i.e. link appeared magically during copy/paste).]
Read more: Saltz: Money, Insularity, and a Huge Controversy for the New Museum — Vulture http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/11/saltz_money_insularity_and_a_h.html#ixzz0WqtM08Pt

However, my personal favorite relational-appendage to the situation is the following drawing, made by William Powhida, for the cover of the Brooklyn Rail [click image for link to hi-res version]:

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